Social Anxiety For Dummies Cheat Sheet

Social anxiety affects the way you think and feel about yourself. You may worry that if you show symptoms of anxiety, you could be negatively evaluated, humiliated, or embarrassed and seen as being socially awkward. For some people, but not everyone, it can lead to lowered self-esteem, social isolation, loneliness, and depression. The good news is that your ability to cope with social anxiety can be improved, and you can even overcome your anxiety if you change your thinking and face your fears.

Common thinking traps with social anxiety

Thinking traps are unhelpful patterns of thought that cause social anxiety and other uncomfortable feelings, and you, along with most people, can fall into these traps from time to time. Falling into a thinking trap is common, even for those without social anxiety. When your mind gets stuck in a negative way of thinking that doesn’t make sense or isn’t based on facts, you’re probably in a thinking trap.

When you’re in a thinking trap, you attach meaning that may not be realistic or helpful. You may not even be aware of your thinking traps, and you probably fall into the same traps again and again. Following are the different types of thinking traps common with social anxiety:

Change negative self-talk into resilient thinking

Negative self-talk can be a quiet or a loud voice in your head that does not see yourself, others, or the world in supportive ways. It can cause you to trick yourself with unrealistic, invalidating, mean, or unhelpful thoughts and beliefs.

Changing your self-talk isn’t easy, and it takes continual practice. Following are steps to take to turn your negative self-talk into thoughts that are compassionate, accepting, logical, and motivating:

How to face your fears of social anxiety

Sometimes, you can’t just think your way out of social anxiety. This is where doing exposures to your fears can help you change your mindset. Exposure refers to deliberately seeking out the situations you have been avoiding. The essential aspect of exposure is what you learn from it. Maybe it’s that your fear did not come true or it could be that you can cope with anxiety better than you expected.

As you face your fears, it’s important to drop safety behaviors that don’t let you learn that you can cope without them.

Following is an overview of the steps involved in doing exposures to face your fears:

1. Create a target list of the fears you want to work on.
2. Identify safety behaviors to stop.
3. Build a fear ladder.
4. Engage in an exposure.
5. Debrief after the exposures.
6. Repeat the exposure or do a new one.

Ten personality patterns of social anxiety

If you have social anxiety, as with any form of anxiety, you may fall into some unhealthy personality patterns. Most of the time you may be a healthy, high-functioning individual, but you may lapse into unhealthy patterns when triggered. The following are common personality patterns of social anxiety:

• The Healthy Individual (with Social Anxiety): This is the goal. You want to be able to accept your feelings and push through them. This does not mean you don’t have social anxiety; it means you can live a full life with it. You stop avoiding, and you eliminate or minimize any of the unhealthy personality patterns outlined in this chapter.
• The Avoider: Avoiding is a broad category and includes the physical avoidance of not showing up or showing up but not fully engaging due to your fear of judgment. Avoidance can be sneaky when you use safety behaviors to engage in the situation but you are not fully present. Avoidance can also come in the form of avoiding your emotions or avoiding conflict.
• The Perfectionist: As a perfectionist, you want things to be a certain way and use many should You have excessively high standards. You can be overly demanding and critical of yourself and others. Perfectionism is a form of control but it doesn’t work.
• The Self-Soother: When this personality trait shows up, you are trying to avoid your feelings of social anxiety by self-soothing your emotions in some way. You may self-soothe through alcohol, food, drugs, the Internet, sex, or other ways.
• The Protector: The protector tries to protect you from difficult thoughts and feelings — such as feeling hurt, inadequate, or defective — by helping you shut down those thoughts and feelings. As a result, you become disconnected from your feelings and are not consciously aware of the connection between your thoughts and feelings. You may be so disconnected that you don’t even realize you have social anxiety.
• The Surrenderer: When the surrenderer shows up, you give in to whatever your social anxiety is telling you and you believe and act accordingly. If your social anxiety says you are weird or awkward, you give in to this belief, and you start to see yourself this way.
• The Worrier: You tend to fret and can be tormented by anxious thoughts and feelings. If you are an obsessive worrier, your negative thoughts may repeat again and again, and they are difficult to let go of. You may worry before, during, and/or after social interactions. This can lead you to ruminate and re-live situations that make you feel bad about yourself, further reinforcing your feelings of inadequacy.
• The Show-Off: The show-off is a form of overcompensating. You may brag about your accomplishments to hide your feelings of incompetence, defectiveness, or shame.
• The Punisher: If you have a punishing side to you, then you believe mistakes should have harsh consequences. You believe your mistakes, as well as the mistakes of others, should be punished. Exhibiting a punishing personality trait can indicate an underlying form of disliking or hating yourself. In its worst case, you may self-harm when you are in this mindset.
• The Vulnerable One: We all have a vulnerable side, but when you feel vulnerable, you may feel sad, scared, ashamed, rejected, or abandoned. When you have social anxiety, you feel exposed, which may cause you to engage in avoidance, unhealthy self-soothing, and fall into other negative personality patterns.